Like it or not, exchanging money for time is increasingly the name of the game.

In games, as in life, the only truly nonrenewable resource is time. Thus, anything that saves a player time in getting something they want will have some important real-world value. World of Warcraft seems to finally be acknowledging this basic economic fact of life, letting players pay $60 to instantly level any character all the way up to level 90 in its upcoming expansion.

Blizzard announced back at Blizzcon 2013 in November that players who purchased the upcoming Warlords of Draenor expansion would be able to instantly level a single character up to level 90 as a free bonus, thereby gaining the ability to take part in new content that's balanced for characters from level 90 to the new level cap of 100. Then, in January, the company said it was also "testing out a feature that gives you the option to purchase a character upgrade directly," allowing players with multiple characters to get the instant boost without, say, buying multiple copies of the expansion (which isn't yet available for preorder).

Last week, WoW Insidernoticed a "Level 90 character boost" item briefly listed in the in-game shop during server maintenance before being quickly removed. The asking price on the listing: $60.

Reactions to the leak ran the gamut. Some seemed offended at the idea of buying levels at all, but others were peeved that Blizzard will be charging as much or more for a level boost than it usually charges for game expansions themselves (recent expansion Mists of Pandaria launched for $40, or $60 for a digital deluxe edition packed with in-game freebies). "If this is true then this is THE biggest scam I have ever seen," said one particularly hyperbolic forum-goer.

"If our goal here was to sell as many boosts as possible, we could halve the price or more than that—make it $10 or something," Hazzikostas said. "And then hardly anyone would ever level a character again. But leveling is something that takes dozens if not over 100 hours in many cases and people have put serious time and effort into that, and we don't want to diminish that.

"The intent here isn't to create a world where no one levels," Hazzikostas continued. "It's just to allow people who want to purchase additional level 90s, maybe they want a second or third alt and they don't have time to level it themselves because they have a family or etc—it's to allow them to do that."

Here's the problem: the "accomplishment of leveling" was devalued the moment Blizzard decided to introduce the instant level boost in the first place. Before Warlords of Draenor, a level-90 character had cachet precisely because it represented "dozens if not over 100 hours" of play time. After Warlords of Draenor, a level-90 character could simply represent someone who was willing to buy the latest version of the game they're currently playing.

Once you've rung that "money equals levels" bell, it only makes sense to sell your newly commoditized leveling system as an à la carte instant upgrade, separate from the expansion itself. But let's not pretend that the value of a World of Warcraft level can be protected by charging an artificially high price for it. Once you allow that people who "don't have time to level" can pay for the privilege, the intrinsic value of leveling is immediately converted from a purely time-based investment to a mixed time/cash-based commodity. Haggling over the price doesn't change that basic and important alteration.

Not that this kind of "devaluing" is necessarily a bad thing. Spending money to save time is an increasingly common (if controversial) part of the online gaming world, especially when it comes to free-to-play MMOs. EVE Online's entire robust in-game economy is based in part on the ability to buy game time with money or in-game cash, to cite just one of many examples.

The addition of instant-leveling can also be seen as an acknowledgement of the ever-present shadow economy surrounding WoW's in-game resources and leveling systems. It's not exactly hard to find companies that will ignore the terms of service and play your character up to whatever level you want in exchange for cash or sell you illicitly farmed gold to fulfill your wildest in-game fantasies.

These gray market services are an outgrowth of the inherent link between time and money as it relates to in-game economies, and trying to squash them (or ignore them) isn't necessarily the best management technique. Indeed, Blizzard ended up trying to take a cut of the money-for-time action with Diablo III's real-money auction house.

Taken to the extreme, Blizzard could do something similar for WoW's leveling system, simply letting the market decide the real-world value of those levels rather than selling them directly. The developers could set up a system where people offer excess experience points directly into a pool, for example, in exchange for cash from the highest bidder. That may sound like a libertarian utopia of supply-and-demand bartering, but Blizzard's disastrous, practically game-breaking experience with the soon-to-be-removed Diablo III real-money auction house suggests it may not work well in practice.

In any case, the idea of needing to experience World of Warcraft to get experience points will soon officially become a thing of the past. You can deride the concept or gripe about the specific pricing, but the one thing you can't do is separate the ever-present link between time and money, especially when it comes to online gaming.

Promoted Comments

On the one hand, I have SEVEN level 90 characters, and I'm tired of leveling. Being able to instantly have another level 90 would be nice.

On the other hand, I have SEVEN level 90 characters. I put the work into leveling and gearing them all - now others can have the same thing that took me months of playtime with a couple days worth of wages.

In the end, as long as blizzard maintains that you have to hit level 90 the hard way at least once before you can buy a level 90, I think I'm OK with it. Not for some ego reason, just that there are valuable learning experiences for the game in those 90 levels.

I'm a casual WoW player--I tend to dip my toes in, get up to the level cap, play endgame for a while, then drop out for a year or two. Between my career and personal life, I simply don't have time to spend endless hours playing. My time budget is more like 5-10 hours per week. If I wanted to try out multiple classes in endgame, we're talking months or years to get those characters leveled up.

Sure, $60 is a lot of money, and a lot of people won't spend that kind of cash when they can trade the time instead. But for me, $60 is an impulse buy. I'd *gladly* spend $60 for the chance to play another class at end-game without dedicating months to getting there. That last 10 levels is enough time to learn how to play the class, plus building a set of questing gear. That puts it more like $60 and a few weeks to be ready for endgame for me. That's reasonable.

There are a few sides to this "medal". If I had already one or 2 level 90, I would love to have the ability to reach it faster on my alts to avoid doing the same content again and again. I've played a lot of mmorpgs and still play some of them at the moment, in fact, I play SWTOR at the moment and finished leveling a new character yesterday, this was a really boring last 3 weeks, but I had to level up this tank for my raid group. I already have 3 level 55 Imperial characters, and had 3 level 55 republic characters, that last character (the 7th level 55) was just a pain to level. Having a 60$ thingy to go from 1-50 instantly would have made me really happy.

But at the same time, i wouldn't want a newbie who as zéro experience with the game (any mmorpg) to reach high level so fast that we have plenty of unskilled characters asking for an end-game group. Level 1, 2 or maybe 3 to top, then give them the reward of having this goodie. In fact, i would give players this goodie at a minimum of 2 characters. Cause even at high level, there are still totally unskilled players putting the wrong stats on their equipment (in swtor for example, i've seen Jedi sages with Aim instead of willpower as their main stats, just because de number were higher... please, do not increase that number of players at the top level).

On a third side, there are tons of gold farmers / powerlevelers illegal sites and untrustable sites that charge for that same service and put lots of accounts in danger and pose major security treat. Like every companies, blizard, bioware, SOE (particularily SOE), trion worlds, have all been hit, one day or another with a security hack. If those little untrusted chinese website have access to players real password (for powerleveling), that mean they can now compare hash code extracted from hacks with real password, and then from that, extract the encryption key. I would do that, and if I would do that, lots of others would do that because I'm not more intelligent that the rest of the population.

And on a fourth side, on the same subject, if you want to cut down an illegal business, why not offer the same thing at lower price? This goodie is pretty cheap considering the powerleveling fees that illegal companies are charging, plus, you don't have the hassle to give your password and account info to someone else, and it's instant.

26 posts | registered Aug 8, 2011

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Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl